Web spotlights ed. 37-38

In this double edition I have 10 web spotlights to share:

1. Finally .. IE9 Beta came out ..

In 3 words: fast, clean and simple. It is probably the first browser that integrates with the OS. You can pin tabs to the task bar and these tabs then function as independent mini-applications. Good review of IE9. I also decided to leave IE6 behind whenever possible. I see some sites still having 8-10% IE6 users, of course these users need to be given a working design, but for my site I discovered the IE6 share (luckily) went down to only 2-4%.. I became a happier designer this week

2. Readability or Clippable ..

I found it on the zen habits blog and it enhances reading of blogs and articles. Just drag one of these bookmarklets to the browser’s toolbar and click it when you want to read an article on a cluttered page. You can also mail the page to a friend. It’s similar to Safari’s “Reader” feature I mentioned some time ago

3. Cloud computing / Amazon Web Services

Sitepoint released Host Your Web Site in the Cloud: Amazon Web Services Made Easy. You can take a sneak preview reading this article that was published yesterday. I bought the ebook to find out how it is developing for the cloud (you get a 3rd off if you are a Sitepoint customer). To be continued ..

Interesting read about cloud services: I and II. Cloud services as dropbox, evernote, gmail, etc are quite comfortable, we almost take them for granted. However, under the hood they handle your files, provide mobile access to them, some have version control, no need for your own hardware and backups/security measures, it’s all been done for you and for free! As these services are so popular it’s worth diving in to cloud development I think

4. 30 WordPress video tutorials Twitter

RT @everis_es: 30 #videotutoriales de #Wordpress – http://bit.ly/cFTlhQ

5. A disastrous week for social media world

First twitter got hit by a XSS exploit: a flaw in the new twitter design allowed messages to pop-up and third-party websites to open in your browser just (!) by moving your mouse over a link. It stresses the importance of (server-side) input validation! Later this week Facebook faced its biggest outage to date due to an error handling bug. Solution? They powered off/on the whole site.. (no joke). Imagine how stressful that must have been for a site that serves +500 million people!

6. Xampp vs mampp

I am much happier with Mampp for Mac than Xampp, it’s probably a personal flavor, but I feel the interface is cleaner, it’s faster and I start the servers w/o pw popups via the Mac’s dashboard widget. Reason was I had issues getting the Yii framework to work, probably because of a permission issue in /Applications/Xampp. I backed up my sites and with Mampp in place, no more issues. See also a this comparison between the 2 apps

7. Facebook fan page

I didn’t actually try this, but it might be useful for anybody that has a brand or business to promote: build a facebook fanpage in 3 simple steps

8. Font-face

I was playing with fonts for my new web design. Fonts in design are as important as colors. I learned to use CSS’ @font-face feature to load Cantarell and Fontin Sans, two beautiful fonts (the header of this blog post is Fontin Sans). If you want to dive in make sure to check out @font-face in IE: Making Web Fonts Work and I found these two articles about typography in general: Why is typography important? and An analysis of typography on the web

9. Tumblr Theme design

A quick guide to designing your custom Tumblr Theme – interesting article giving the basics and potential problems (= timesaver for anyone who wants to dive into Tumblr design)